What is God’s Will?

A while back I was pondering a ministry decision and found myself going back and forth, weighing all the various human and political factors – how will that student respond to decision A?  How will this other student respond to decision B?  What are the benefits of taking this course?  What are the risks of taking that other course?  And so on and so forth.  After a long period of going back and forth and genuinely being uncertain, I finally exhausted myself with these kinds of questions and asked a more basic question: what is most pleasing to the Lord?  Regardless of how people will respond or what the outcome will be, what is the right thing to do? What is God’s will?

The human and political questions are important and necessary, but its so liberating and clarifying to realize that our ultimate accountability is to God Himself, not to any human court or opinion.  While I want to make every effort to live peaceably with others (Romans 12:18), my ultimate responsibility is not to other people, but to Christ (Galatians 1:10).  That not only brings clarity amidst a thousand competing voices, but it also frees me to follow God’s leading with confidence – to pull the trigger on a decision, even if I can’t foresee all the consequences.  Praise God for the sheer simplicity of his call – we’re not responsible for pleasing everybody, or fixing all the problems, or managing some desired result.  Ultimately, we’re responsible to simply trust and obey, as best we are able.

“Try to discern what is pleasing to the Lord.”  -Ephesians 5:10

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Kostenberger and Swain on the Trinity in John

I’ve been reading my second book in the New Studies in Biblical Theology series, Kostenberger and Swain’s Father, Son, and Spirit: The Trinity and John’s Gospel (series #24, IVP, 2008). Ever since reading Robert Letham’s comment in The Holy Trinity that Trinitarianism in the gospel of John is an area that has been neglected in the scholarship, I’ve wanted to do a study on this, and I’ve also been meaning to read another NSBT book – so when I saw this book I knew it would be one to read carefully.  Though the whole book is great, I especially appreciated the second half (Part 3: Theological Reflections).  Some takeaways:

1) Kostenberger and Swain are concerned to show the link between the church’s exegesis of Scripture and her confessional formulations, or in other words, between the Bible and theology.  This not only made their book refreshing and multifaceted, but it also demonstrated how the doctrine of the Trinity is practical.  Its not an irrelevant, esoteric dogma, pursued by ivory tower theologians.  No, its a part of the fabric of the New Testament witness and a vital part of Christian experience and worship in that witness.  In John, for example, Christian unity is rooted in Trinitarian unity (17:11, 21); Christian mission is rooted in Trinitarian mission (20:21); Christian love is rooted in Trinitarian love (17:26).  Kostenberger and Swain especially show how important the motif of mission is to John’s understanding of the Trinity (107, 171), which casts everything related to the doctrine of the Trinity in a practical light.  As they put it:

“Belief in the Trinity is not merely needed on the intellectual, cognitive level as part of subscribing to an orthodox Christian creed; it is that very triune God who is rightly the ground, energizing force, and goal undergirding the Christian mission” (164).

2) I’m finally realizing all that is at stake in debates about the definition of the word “person” in the phrase, “one being, three persons.”  This is more than just an East-West issue, but something at play among those advocating a so-called “social trinitarianism” (which Kostenberger and Swain argue against in a footnote on pp. 174-5).  I myself cannot say that I understand how you can have a “person” without a distinct consciousness and will.  But I’d like to hear more what people like Augustine and Aquinas are trying to say here when they define “person” as a relation.

3) My greatest takeaway from the book was being convinced (especially from pp. 179-186) that it is valid to infer from the economic (historical) to the immanent (eternal).  As they put it: “temporal missions reveal and are rooted in eternal processions” (180).  The relationships of the Father, Son, and Spirit in their historical revelation do not have an arbitrary and random connection to their eternal relationships.  This insight is not rooted in an out-dated translated of monogenes or biased interpretation of John 15:26 (though note the different tenses!), but in the simple and necessary conviction that God’s revelation is true.  Who He reveals Himself to be in history is who He actually is.  After all, the entire purpose of the economic is to enfold us into the immanent (17:24-26), to bring us into the love and glory existing between the persons of the Godhead from eternity past – so why should it not reveal something of the nature of this love and glory?  This insight is the fundamental reason why I affirm the filioque.  If valid inferences can be made from the economic to the immanent, then it seems to me that Christ’s reception and bestowal of the Spirit in history (John 14:16, 26, 15:26, 16:7, Acts 2:33) reveals something of the eternal relationship between Christ and the Spirit.

I’d like to study the Trinity more sometime.  It would be fascinating, for example, to compare differing developments in the East and West, using Augustine and John of Damascus as test cases.

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TGC Brief Recap

I had a great time in Chicago.  It was fun to be away, hang with my friend Ryan, reconnect with friends and family, and be blessed from some great teaching and worship.  I thought Tim Keller’s sermon was fantastic, as usual.  I also learned a lot from Bryan Chapell’s thoughtful questions during the Tuesday night panel discussion, and from D.A. Carson’s sermon on Melchizedek (though we had to leave this one a bit early to catch our flight).  Several things I missed, and will have to listen to online.  The panel discussion between Keller, Dever, and Loritts on what a local church should look like was interesting, but I thought it would have been more helpful if they had stated and discussed their disagreements more openly – I left feeling like they hadn’t yet really gotten into things. One of the most helpful moments of the week was simply sitting around with my family and a few friends and talking about what it means to preach Christ from the Old Testament (the theme of the conference).  That was fun.  I’d like to do more of that.

But the part of the conference I learned the most from was my Dad’s breakout session on “justification versus self-justification.”  Dad walked us through various passages in Galatians and contrasted justification and self-justification, especially in their social dynamics.  He argued that faithfulness to the gospel requires gospel culture as well as gospel doctrine.  You can access the paper he read here.  Its definitely worth the time.  If I had to put into words what I personally walked away with, I would say this: the gospel of free justification liberates us to live in a new and beautiful way, genuinely loving other people, rather than using and needing them.  Those are my own words, and they don’t sound that magnificent – but the reality that Dad pointed us to is magnificent.  His closing words addressed the “how?” question:

“Is [this] even possible? Yes, but only if we walk by the Spirit moment by moment. ‘But I say, walk by the Spirit and you will not gratify the desires of the flesh’ (Galatians 5:16). That is not mechanical or formulaic. It is costly at a deeply personal level. But there is no other way. It means more than theological alertness. It means real-time dependence on God. It means putting ourselves – not others – under the judgment of his Word. It means being forgiven constantly, making endless mid-course corrections, and following Christ with daily crucifixions of our pride.”

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Headed to Chicago

Headed to Chicago this week for The Gospel Coalition conference, and then returning to a busy schedule.  Light posting ahead.

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Becoming a Theologian

A background project I’m chipping away at during 2011 is volume 1 of Karl Barth’s Church Dogmatics.  For Christmas I got the 2010 paperback study edition, which is definitely worth getting over the first edition for the translation of all the Greek and Latin quotes.  The smaller font sections, where Barth interacts with other theologians, are some of the most interesting parts.  Thus far, his favorite sparring partners seem to be Luther, Calvin, and Melanchthon, with Augustine and Aquinas also making regular appearances, Schleiermacher and Tillich as the occasional whipping boys, and occasional references to all kinds of others I’ve never heard of, like Vincent of Lerins (34), or Hermann Cutter (71).  Its interesting the way he regularly distinguishes his view as the “evangelical” view between Roman Catholicism and liberal Protestantism (33ff., 58ff.).  If I had to articulate as succinctly as I could the main theme that I already see creeping in, I would use these 5 words: theology is not externally verified (hence the title of the work).  Two other themes I’m picking up on are (1) faith and obedience are essential for theology, and (2) theology must distinguish between the crater (the reverberation of God’s speech and activity) and the bomb (God’s speech and activity itself).  A point that I found particularly interesting was his argument that theological prolegomena cannot be done without reference to the doctrine of the Trinity and Christology (43).

There is a short quote from Martin Luther on p. 18 that struck me when I read it and has been turning over and over in my mind ever since.  Barth is discussing the need for personal and existential engagement in theology, and he quotes Luther as saying, “not by thinking, but by living and being damned does one become a theologian.”  Its a typically “take it with a grain of salt” Lutheran statement, and yet it seems to me to have a certain ring of truth to it.  We don’t find God most truly in comfort and thinking, but in a hospital – on a battlefield – at a funeral.

If that’s true (and I think it is), its enough to change my whole paradigm.  Even if my greatest goal were to become a theologian, a Phd (though of great value) may not be the surest route.  How much more if my greatest goal is simply to know and love Jesus Christ!  Only on the path of surrender is true knowledge.

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